(eng) Translated Posts : How do you have fun in Madagascar ?
By adminThanks to our Foko coordinators Lova and Mialy for translating these wonders from FBC !!!

Zouboon Lomelle, and Diana hanging at Majunga most popular spot : the borderwalk.
Witched from FBC-UN Club
What do young people do for fun in Madagasikara ?
As technology evolves in Madagascar, it is a good idea to let you know what young people do for fun here. We will see two groups of young people in genera, rural young people and urban ones.
Young people’s ways of having fun depend heavily on their parents’ upbringing and means. It should be clear that urban and rural youth have fun in completely different manners. Even in the twenty first century, many are still holding on to the ancestral ways.
Rural youth do not know many ways of having fun, due to lack of development, they all rush to early marriage, so that there are not many ways of having fun apart from soccer, television… They do not have much fun !
In the capital we all can see, depending on one’s wallet though, right now many young people love going to night clubs, hanging out outside, apart from the well off who go to casinos etc… And then there is a lot of interest in computers and internet, which many people in Madagascar love, even the older ones.
Fun is good guys, but do not have too much ! I swear that’s the truth !
I am talking about the slang used by the youth of our generation,
What is that ?
When new words or phrases are used by everyone at home, in the streets or within an institution, college and high school students always say that they were the first to use them or even that they created them. It’s crazy, but I saw two groups of students from two different schools get into a fight because of two things: first, because the girls from high school X went out with guys from high school Y and the second reason as it appears, is because a guy from high school Y has called a guy from high school X as homosexual but using a word that is a very specific youngster slang that is not very well-known. Unfortunately both knew what it meant and this is where the fight began. I did not watch the end of it because these things do not appeal to me but it intrigued me for a shortwhile.
However, there is another type of slang that everyone has been using since year 2000:
It is “Ra Marie” (Miss Mary) which means to be hungry or very hungry. Everyone without exception used the word when they were hungry, even in the streets. We discussed the origin of that phrase between friends and a college girl who knows enough of the city said it was a group of young hungry guys who wanted to break bread at the cafeteria who invented the phrase because the lady at the cafeteria was Mary and the group made it a code word, when they did not want others to know when they wanted to eat. A few days later, a student from another school swore that that they first came up with the words because one day he and his colleagues had made a prank to the owner of a grocery store near the school and she also was called Mary. Other versions have also been rumored about the origin of Miss Mary so we finally will never know who is to credited for it, and I’ll leave you with that because Miss Mary is going after me.
Patricia from FBC-UN Club :
We all dream of what we can become one day ! An engineer, a physician, a professor… who has not dreamed of becoming one as a child? Those are often the first professions one aspires to, simply because these are the ones seen on a daily basis or most often.
As we grow up, our ambition is confirmed and we choose all ways necessary to fulfill it! This change of ambition and goal with age has been provoked by our experiences, our abilities and most of all by the examples we discover little by little in life. Our idols change us and manage to convince us easily.
At a certain time in life, we all ask the same questions “What did I want to become?What have I become?” We all think that if at one given time, answers to those questions are compatible, we have succeeded our life and we are at the top! But if the answers do not match, does that mean that we have failed our life? Everybody has an answer to that question, but personally, I would not believe so !
Nobody fails his life. We just feel a bit lost compared to the others sometimes, but this moment is also aprt of ourlife ! Maybe we have become the one we did not waht to but so many what to be what we are at the moment ! So life will not stop because we think we are at the wrong place, in the contrary, many people do all they can to win our place. At that moment, it is up to us to fight to defend what we are, even if we are far from our idols ! We should not feel lost because we think we have failed, because it is true, we never fail our life; we just get some food for thoughts sometimes to wake us up and to help us get our life in order.
“It is never too late to become what one could have been”

2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Romi
Great posts, thanks for the translation!
Getting to know young people from the other side of the world through their words is a unique experience, and just makes one see how similar we really all are (having fun, speaking slang, or even pondering life ambitions) despite cultural differences.
Looking forward to reading more
Aug 12th, 2008
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